University Campus nurses might strike over holiday weekend

Sunday

May 19, 2013 at 6:00 AMMay 19, 2013 at 9:22 PM

By Aaron Nicodemus

Thursday, May 23. Mark it on your calendar.

A hospital strike looms. Millions of dollars are at stake.

And there is a very real possibility that the region's largest health care provider, UMass Memorial Health Care, will be filling its largest facility, the University Campus, with hundreds of out-of-area nurses who are unfamiliar with the facilities, who have never worked with the doctors there and who don't know the patients or the community.

On Friday, nurses at the Memorial and Hahnemann campuses agreed to a three-year deal that gives them a 4.5 percent raise over three years and sets mandatory minimum staffing levels of five patients to every one nurse on every shift and in most departments. Staffing levels had been the major sticking point.

But the University Campus nurses have not agreed to the exact same terms and may still strike. They are scheduled to sit down with hospital management and a federal negotiator on Monday to resume talks.

University Campus is the largest of UMass Memorial's three hospitals, and it houses the hospital group's emergency department.

The union has threatened to start its strike at 6 a.m. May 23 and come back to work at 6 a.m. May 24.

UMHC management has threatened to lock out the University Campus nurses for five total days. They would rather keep replacement nurses on the job, even though the nurses say they the strike would end after 24 hours. UMass wants to lock out the nurses until May 28.

"It would be irresponsible for the Medical Center to pay the costs of these replacement nurses and return striking nurses to work before the expiration of the five-day period," wrote Eric Dickson, president and chief executive officer for UMass Memorial Health Care, in a letter to nurses last week.

That means — yes, look at your calendars — that the strike may very well stretch over all of Memorial Day weekend. Can you imagine?

The county's only level-one trauma center, where the sickest and most injured patients are sent, would be staffed by replacement nurses over a summer holiday weekend? The union could not have planned it better, if their goal was to get people's attention.

The nurses who chose to go on strike — who talk about patient safety and "unsafe staffing," but who are walking off the job, abandoning their patients — will be on the sidewalk, holding signs, yelling at their replacements.

But management, with its insistence on locking out the nurses for five days, is equally at fault.

Make no mistake. This strike will be ugly. It will be painful. Patients, nurses and the hospital group will all suffer.

I asked Dr. Dickson how he felt about the nurses calling the staffing levels at UMass Memorial unsafe.

"It's disappointing to me," he said.

He said UMass Memorial has a long record of providing excellent care, and that excellence is supported by sufficient staffing levels.

"Unsafe is not a word we hear when we're on the floor, at the bedside, talking with patients," said Dr. Dickson, who is an emergency room physician at the University Campus.

He said that those words come from the Massachusetts Nurses Association, an "external force" with a "national agenda" that brings the same claims of unsafe staffing to all of its hospital negotiations — whether it be St. Vincent Hospital and Baystate Franklin Medical Center last year, or Quincy Medical Center this year, or others.

Look, times are tough for health care organizations like UMass Memorial. They have laid off 500 nurses in the past two years, in the face of declining reimbursements and a weakening in-patient volumes. So management is making the hard choices that need to be made to keep UMass Memorial profitable.

But if the strike happens, UMass Memorial will spend millions of dollars paying replacement nurses. Use that money to hire more nurses, settle the contract and end the strike!

Neither side is right on this. Split the difference, University Campus nurses and management. Each of you can declare victory to your people. And the region's largest emergency room does not have to be staffed by nurses trucked to the campus by a temporary staffing agency.